Regarding the "classpath:" thing: the initial stacktrace suggests a JUnit environment and by default, the JVM does not know how to treat "classpath:" URIs.

Had mentioned this here:
https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-12635?focusedCommentId=102481&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-102481

My quick and dirty workaround was to add Apache Tomcat Cataline depdendency to Maven test scope and invoke

org.apache.catalina.webresources.TomcatURLStreamHandlerFactory.register()

before test classes launch. This registers a URL handler that knows about "classpath:" protocol.